President Joe Biden's reelection campaign is doing something unusual: training $25 million in advertising on a handful of swing states very early in the 2024 cycle.
The ad campaign kicked off last week with a spot on the NFL season opener between the Detroit Lions and the Kansas City Chiefs. But the entire buy is quite complex, microtargeting specific audiences on varying platforms in battleground states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The Washington Post's Michael Scherer has a great explainer on the campaign. In Pennsylvania, for instance, the narrator has a Puerto Rican accent, while in Arizona, the narrator speaks with a Mexican accent—an effort to reach a targeted Latino population in each state. The same is true for Black audiences in certain regions, who will see a version of the ad touting Biden's efforts to cut “Black child poverty” and boost “Black businesses.” In other regions, a female narrator will emphasize reproductive rights messaging.
Part of what makes Team Biden's effort so unique is that it’s such a muscular ad buy so early in the cycle. As Scherer noted, former President Donald Trump's reelection campaign didn't start advertising until October 2020. And former President Barack Obama's main ad buys began in March 2012. Team Biden's ad campaign is most certainly a recognition of the fact that Americans remain largely clueless about the president's legislative accomplishments and how they are paying dividends for Americans in states that will surely decide the 2024 contest. As an octogenarian, Biden's age also concerns voters—an issue that won't recede with time as we move closer to Election Day.
Here’s an example of the messaging Team Biden is deploying on social media:
On one hand, the early buy is an admission that Biden's image needs an early boost. But on the other hand, the strategy is refreshingly adept and aggressive for Democrats, who are preternaturally prone to retracting into a defensive crouch in the face of adversity.
The early infusion will allow Biden to burnish his image while 2024 Republican hopefuls are still duking it out to take on the party's four-time indictee, who could conceivably be a convict by next summer, when the Republican Party will hold its nominating convention.
“I think the distance between what the president has accomplished and what the public perceives in terms of performance is disconcerting,” ad man Jim Margolis, alum of the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns, told Scherer. “Right now the campaign has the opportunity to begin to tell their story, mostly without opposition advertising getting in their way.”
Donate now to stop Republicans from snatching the Senate!
Why does it seem like Republicans have such a hard time recruiting Senate candidates who actually live in the states they want to run in? We're discussing this strange but persistent phenomenon on this week's edition of "The Downballot." The latest example is former Michigan Rep. Mike Rogers, who's been spending his time in Florida since leaving the House in 2015, but he's not the only one. Republican Senate hopefuls in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Montana, and Wisconsin all have questionable ties to their home states—a problem that Democrats have gleefully exploited in recent years. (Remember Dr. Oz? Of course you do.)